some cases, however, one of them may attain a decided prominence in comparison with the others; such a syllable may be said to bear a secondary accent.
☞ The vowel of the syllable bearing the secondary accent is denoted where necessary by the grave accent `.
iii. Most monosyllables are stressed, but many frequently-recurring monosyllables bear no stress, but are pronounced in conjunction with another word. These are proclitics, which precede the accented word, and enclitics, which follow it.
The Welsh proclitics are the article y, yr, the prefixed pronouns fy, dy, etc., which are always unstressed. Usually also the relatives a, yẟ, yr, y, the negative, interrogative and affirmative particles, most conjunctions as the a in bara a chaws ‘bread and cheese’, and often prepositions as the rhag in rhag ofn ‘for fear’.
The Welsh enclitics are the auxiliary pronouns i, di, etc. They are often written in mss. where they do not count in the metre, as in Arduireaue tri b.b. 36 (Arẟwyrëaf-i drf) for Arddwyreaf dri (5 syll.) ‘I will exalt Three’. These may however be accented for emphasis.
§ 40. i. In Mn. W. all polysyllables, with a few exceptions named in § 41, are accented on the penult; as cá|naf ‘I sing., cán|i̯ad ‘a song’, can|i̯á|dau ‘songs’.
ii. The position of the accent was certainly the same in the Late Ml. period. This is proved by the fact that in the 14th cent. the cynghanedd was fully developed in its modern form in which the penultimate accent plays an important part, ZfCP. iv 123 ff.
iii. (1) But certain vowel values point to a period when the accent fell generally on the ultima. The evidence seems to show that this was the case in O. W., and that the transition took place in the Early Ml. W. period.
(2) The clear sound ɥ occurs in the ultima only; the obscure sound ỿ, which must have been the sound when unaccented, occurs in all other syllables. Hence the ultima must at one time have borne the accent. In monosyllables which have always been unaccented such as the article yr, y, the sound is ỿ; but in those which have always been accented, such as dyẟ ‘day’, it is ɥ. There has been no shifting of the accent in ỿ dɥ̄́ẟ ‘the day’, which therefore preserves the accentuation that resulted in the vowel sequence ỿ…ɥ. Hence a word like mỿ́nɥẟ, which contains this sequence, must once have been accented *mỿnɥ̄́ẟ.
